Not much is new

I'm sitting outside my sister's house using their wi-fi. The swing is shady, at least.

All of a sudden I am going to an instructional technology conference at Elon on Monday, with my old friend and colleague Sarah Reuning. It will be good to talk to other IT folks, share ideas and do the "networking" thing. I'm looking forward to it.

Damn, it's hot.

I was glad Discovery landed safely. Now let's replace those buckets of 1970's technology so we don't have to cross our fingers every time we launch one. Better yet, let Burt Rutan fix it.

I've been reading Spencer Well's The Journey of Man after Tai Chi and before bed. Wells is a leading genetecist and one of the folks responsible for mapping modern man's colonization of the planet by mapping the mutations, or polymorphisms, introduced into the human genome over the last 50,000 years. It is amazing how much can be reconstructed about the human journey, which is shown to be irrefutably out of Africa and across Eurasia and Australia (and then the Pacific and the Americas) in branching waves, putting to rest speculative and sometimes racist ideas of multiregional evolution from earlier hominids. For the umpteenth time.

Anyway, that's pretty much my news from the Ville.